It happened once again, coming home from a business dinner at about 9:20pm, this evening. This time it was the BEL STi Driver and the Valentine One pitted against a Pennsylvania State Trooper who was hiding in a very wide median strip using instant-on K against westbound drivers of Route 422 towards Reading.
This time the margin of advantage to the STi Driver was about 3-4 seconds while I was initially traveling at about 75-80mph in a 55 zone. Got the initial alert of K on the STi Driver followed then by the Valentine One. Proceeded at a more sedate pace of 60mph for about another 4-5 seconds and then nothing.
Knowing the area well, I usually don't get K alerts here unless there is a speedtrap. Sure enough about 15 seconds later, I spot a cruiser sitting in the center - which is about 200 feet in width with trees and bushes. And then almost an instant after that a full blast of K-band which instantly pegged the signal strength meters of both detectors.
To be sure, both provided ample warning to this particular ambush, but - and this is really the amazing part - I also believe that the STi Driver actually alerted to one additional trigger-pull of instant-on radar to the motorists ahead than did the Valentine 1 and at a point where I didn't have a perfect line-of-sight to the patrol car ahead.
This was a similar kind of scenario, a couple of week ago, with the NJ trooper, who was running an instant-on X-band speedtrap, where the advantage was with the STi Driver at about 7 seconds. I suspect that it too had picked up an additional trigger-pull of instant-on radar to the motorists who were ahead of me on that Interstate at about a distance that was a bit greater at the time of that initial alert. In this instance there wasn't a clear line-of-sight, to the NJ State Trooper, either.
Again, breathtaking performance and I believe these are the first times I have actually witnessed another radar detector [other than the V1] achieving such a performance level in all my years of driving with them.
I will be looking forward to my upcoming trip to Florida and back to see how the STi Driver does against instant-on Ka traps. The one encounter that I had in Florida several weeks ago gave the advantage to the V1 by about 2 seconds - which was pretty big considering the nature of that speedtrap and the fact that I was cruising at about 90mph in a posted 70 zone, but that was with the STi Driver with POP ON. Now that POP is off and the performance decidedly has gone up, I'll be anxious to see how it performs with this configuration.
If it's performance with X and K are any kind of indicator, the results could really be illuminating, indeed.
More to come...